This is my last post on SalesforceJoe.com. I will not be renewing this domain. The site will go dark in July 2026 — which is, not without irony, the same month my career at Anthem fell apart. That symmetry says something I don’t need to editorialize on.

After years of genuine dedication to the Salesforce ecosystem — writing, building, consulting, and championing this platform — I have utterly lost any and all interest. This post is my honest accounting of why.

The Company Is Dying, and I Watched It Happen

Salesforce is not the platform it once was. The acquisitions that were supposed to supercharge the ecosystem — Slack, MuleSoft, Tableau, and yes, Vlocity — have been mismanaged into irrelevance or neglect. The energy that once made Salesforce a genuine innovation engine has been replaced by a relentless push to sell the next half-baked thing before the last one has matured.

The current headline act is AgentForce, and I wrote about my skepticism in late 2025. My position then was that AI branding had gotten ahead of AI reality. My position now is stronger: AgentForce is being pushed onto clients who have zero use case and zero technical capability to support it. I know this because I was expected to push it myself — and I refused. Not out of stubbornness, but out of professional integrity. You do not sell a client a solution to a problem they don’t have.

What Salesforce Did to My Last Client

What happened next is the incident that ended my relationship with this ecosystem.

After we concluded our work and left the engagement, Salesforce’s own team went to my client and told them that we had damaged their org. We had performed only standard configuration — the kind of work that cannot, by definition, cause the damage they implied. There was nothing exotic, nothing risky, nothing that warranted that characterization. This wasn’t a technical dispute about a complex implementation. It was a claim made after we were gone, with no opportunity to respond.

My read: Salesforce saw an opening to pitch leadership on a rebuild. Leadership was already frustrated — but not because the technology failed. The business case behind the engagement was broken from the start. Requirements were driven by people who don’t work in sales. There was no growth mindset, no tracking of failures, no defined sales process. The platform cannot fix any of that. A rebuild would not have fixed it either — but it would have generated revenue for a Salesforce account team with a quota to hit. We were the convenient explanation for why the ROI wasn’t showing up.

I am not naming the client. I am not making claims I cannot support. What I am saying is that if you are choosing between trusting a Salesforce account team and trusting an independent consultant with years of delivered work and skin in the game, I’d think carefully about that choice.

The Anthem Chapter: A Bad Taste That Never Left

Before this, there was Anthem — now rebranded as Elevance Health, which feels fitting, since rebranding is often how companies escape accountability for what they did under the old name.

I delivered what I genuinely believe was a home-run Salesforce implementation for Anthem — a sophisticated, end-to-end health insurance business process build on the Salesforce platform. The kind of work that makes a portfolio. The kind of work I was proud of.

Then I got sick.

I disclosed my disability and asked for accommodation. What followed was a clinic in how a large employer can fail every obligation it has to a worker while keeping the paperwork clean.

When I raised my disability, Anthem did not engage in The Interactive Process — the collaborative, good-faith dialogue between employer and employee that the ADA requires before any accommodation decision is made. They did not do that. Instead, in the same breath they were encouraging me to take time off, they were telling me I was “not cut out for the job.” I had been doing this job for eight years at the highest levels, with strong performance ratings, up until the point I got sick. That assessment had nothing to do with my work. It was positioning.

Anthem’s official position is that I resigned. Legally, that is not what happened. What they created was a constructive discharge — a recognized legal condition in which an employee is left with no viable option but to leave. There was no cooling-off period. No good-faith effort at retention. No accommodation offered. No path forward. I had nothing left. I had to go.

Here is the part that still stuns me: I have it in writing from them that my illness was caused by the workplace. They acknowledged it. And then Elevance — the company formerly known as Anthem, one of the largest health insurers in the country — declined to cover it (the coverage changed when they changed names - and they carved out an exception for behavioral health - mind you). The company that made me sick would not cover the sickness they caused. That is not an opinion. That is what the documents say.

On the matter of pay: Anthem failed to pay me correctly before I left. This was not a gray area — it was clear enough that my then-wife sent an email directly to their board raising the issue. The proof of what they did is in what came next: Anthem paid me on multiple separate occasions after my “termination,” correcting their own payroll errors each time. That’s their own admission. In the meantime, they had left me without income, refused to correct it, and removed every option I had. I had to drain my retirement savings and take the IRS penalty just to survive. I was left with no recourse, no support, and no dignity.

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. But if you are a disabled worker — especially one with a mental health condition — navigating a large corporate environment, please read the EEOC’s guidance on disability discrimination before you need it. Know your rights. Document everything. Do not assume that a company in the business of selling health coverage is in the business of protecting your health.

One more thing: be careful with the EEOC. When I engaged them, they directed me toward a gender discrimination claim. That may have been a factor — I was told to be more like “Brian,” a colleague who was himself mocked for being quiet. But that framing missed the point, and the result was that Anthem got away with discarding a top-rated employee at a moment when internal documents show they were looking to reduce headcount anyway. Being sick, broke, and unable to fight a large corporation made me easy to remove. The EEOC process, as I experienced it, is not built to help people in that position.

Vlocity: A Billion-Dollar Love Story With a Bad Ending

I spent years making the case for OmniStudio — the platform formerly known as Vlocity. I believed in it completely. The declarative power, the FlexCards, the OmniScripts — it was genuinely transformational for industries like healthcare and insurance. I wrote about it extensively. I built with it. I evangelized it.

Salesforce acquired Vlocity in 2020 for approximately $1.33 billion. In 2017 I met the co-founder, he had us over to his place appreciative of what we were building with them. They’ve all since forgotten. And I pushed the technology more than anyone else - even holding court with their own employees, laying out the E2E plan, reshapping their product.

And then they killed it.

Not immediately, not loudly, but gradually and unmistakably. OmniStudio is flat-out dying. Salesforce did not hire the people who understood why it worked — the people who could have shown them what made it magic and how to evolve it. Instead, they absorbed it, rebranded it, and let it fade while chasing the next shiny thing. That’s not an acquisition strategy. That’s a billion dollars of waste.

I built my career around tools that were supposed to have futures. That was the bet. It did not pay off — not for me personally, and not for the clients who invested in that ecosystem on my recommendation. Omnistudio was the tool I could build experiences with that didn’t need change management - we adapted to their needs intuitively, using what it gave us, nothing more.

Why I’m Done

This is not a rage quit. It is a clear-eyed conclusion.

Salesforce as a platform has been good to some people at certain times. The community is still full of talented, hard-working practitioners. But the company itself has made choices — about honesty, about how it treats independent consultants, about which products it invests in versus which it lets decay — that I cannot get behind anymore.

I built this story over years. I wrote every post on this site in good faith. I tried to help people understand a complicated platform and build careers on it.

But I’m done. This domain won’t renew. These posts will eventually go dark. And I’m moving on to work that actually pays off — not just for the company selling the licenses, but for the people doing the work.

It’s been real.

— Joe

The views expressed in this post are my personal opinions based on my direct professional experience.